1. Field of the Invention:
The invention relates to a method for testing speech comprehension of a person assisted by a hearing aid.
Hearing aids can help a person with diminished hearing perception compared with a person with normal hearing to perceive his/her environment in the same way as the person with normal hearing. However this is only possible with a high-quality hearing aid, which has to be adjusted precisely to the individual hearing loss of the person in question. It is particularly important for hearing-impaired people that they are able to converse with other people and therefore comprehend speech. It is therefore expedient and necessary to test the quality of a hearing aid and/or the quality of its adjustment in particular in respect of voice signals.
Hearing aids are already tested regularly during the development stage or after manufacture. Tests are also carried out in particular to determine the extent to which certain algorithms, for example for compression, frequency compression, noise interference suppression, etc., influence the ability of a person assisted by the hearing aid to comprehend speech. However speech comprehension tests can also be expediently carried out during or after hearing aid adjustment.
A method for testing and optimizing hearing aids is known from the publication US 2005/0027537 A1, in which a user assisted by a hearing aid is presented with meaningless syllables. Settable parameters of the hearing aid are reset as a function of whether the presented syllables are correctly understood.